Stephen Hawking thinks President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement and the British Brexit decision might trigger a chain of events which leads to the destruction of the world. My question – where is the evidence?

Hawking says Trump’s climate stance could damage Earth

By Pallab Ghosh

Science correspondent, BBC News

2 July 2017

Stephen Hawking says that US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement could lead to irreversible climate change.\

Prof Hawking said the action could put Earth onto a path that turns it into a hothouse planet like Venus.

He also feared aggression was “inbuilt” in humans and that our best hope of survival was to live on other planets.

…

In its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC authors wrote: “The precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger tipping points (thresholds for abrupt and irreversible change) remain uncertain, but the risk associated with crossing multiple tipping points in the Earth system or in interlinked human and natural systems increases with rising temperature.”

…

“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid,” he told BBC News.

“Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it’s one we can prevent if we act now. By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children.”

…

And on Brexit, he feared UK research would be irreparably damaged.

“Science is a cooperative effort, so the impact will be wholly bad, and will leave British science isolated and inward looking”.

Hawking’s suggestion that the USA could somehow lead others into economic hardship by destroying the domestic US economy is and always was a liberal fantasy.

As for Hawking’s claim we could end up like Venus, a statement without evidence, even from someone with Stephen Hawking’s reputation or from the IPCC, is no more valid than a prognostication provided by a psychic gazing into a crystal ball.

The Earth has experienced far higher CO2 levels than the present day. CO2 levels in the Cretaceous, the age of the Dinosaurs, were 1700ppm – more than 4x today’s level. The Earth has experienced extreme warming and extreme cooling, but has never experienced a runaway greenhouse effect which made it totally uninhabitable like Venus.

Gigantic CO2 belching volcanic eruptions which lasted for 1000s, maybe millions of years, huge meteor strikes, the advance and retreat of giant ice sheets – for billions of years since life began, nothing in our violent geological history has managed to shift temperatures outside a range where life is possible somewhere on our planet.

Nothing we have done or are likely to do to our planet can come close to what nature has already done – to what our planet has already endured.

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Does that count the 1000 + coal fired electric generation plants the other members are building??? I guess the USA was to spend 2 billion $$ ofseting their construction. Yeah, it might destroy the world😳

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July 3, 2017 7:07 pm

Greg

Hawking’s speciality is physics, the standard model of physics which has been the “consensus” for several decades can only explain 5% of the mass and energy in the universe. They have to invent mythical “dark energy” and “dark matter” to balance their equations. That makes Trenberth’s “missing heat” look trivial.
Would you trust this man’s opinion on the energy balance of the Earth ?Physics is out by a factor of 20, he is probably quite impressed with climate models which are only out by factor of two.

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July 3, 2017 9:59 pm

Greg

“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid,” he told BBC News.

That is so stupid and ignorant I find it hard to believe that is what he actually said.

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July 3, 2017 10:18 pm

Leonard Lane

Yep. Hawking is out of his league and saying things that are embarrassing. Parallel between dark matter/energy and global warming is interesting and funny. Thanks.

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July 3, 2017 10:48 pm

Bryan A

That is because Global Warming is really brought about by a Dark Energy imbalance created by a Dark Matter inversion. Similar to the Dark Matter melting the Greenland Ice Sheet

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July 3, 2017 11:20 pm

Colorado Wellington

I get it. Dark matter, dark energy and Trump the Dark Lord. We live in a post-rational world.

Greg – that (“That is so stupid and ignorant I find it hard to believe that is what he actually said.”) was exactly my first thought. But Pallab Ghosh does appear to be a reputable correspondent, so it seems reasonable to suppose that Stephen Hawking really did say it. How are the mighty fallen.

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July 4, 2017 3:33 am

Chris Wright

I would take his opinions on cosmology and black holes fairly seriously – in those fields he is a great scientist.
But he is clearly ignorant about the climate. Maybe he’s unaware that CO2 was far higher for most of Earth’s history, and that we actually live in an era of very low CO2. Without mankind, it’s even possible that the next ice age will trigger the biggest extinction in history due to falling CO2.
As Hawking has just shown, there’s nothing to stop great scientists also being great idiots.
Chris

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July 4, 2017 6:18 am

Latitude

I would like for just one of these loons to explain why it’s never happened before….
..they can’t even do that

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July 4, 2017 6:46 am

MarkW

Venus is Venus because it was too close to the sun for it too cool down sufficiently for the water in it’s atmosphere to condense out. There never was a “runaway greenhouse” on Venus, it’s always been as it is now.
Venus is currently hot because of how close it is to the sun and all the water in it’s atmosphere.
McClod, knowing about radiation gets you about 1% of the way to knowing about climate. If that much.

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July 4, 2017 6:53 am

Craig

He’s trying to stay relevant. He’s smart enough to know that the mainstream media will never challenge his claims, no matter how ludicrous, and that the more over the top he goes the more he will be held up as a hero particularly by the left in the age of Trump.

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July 4, 2017 9:15 am

Dave_G

I can only conclude that the Russians have hacked Hawking’s laptop…… if these were indeed ‘his’ utterings then he’s been bought, pure and simple.

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July 4, 2017 10:29 am

Bryan A

Venus I’d hot not from its proximity to the sun but because of the atmospheric pressure. The surface pressure is 90 times that of earth.
Earth atmospheric pressure at MSL is 14.5 psi (pounds per square inch) or 1 bar.
Venus atmospheric pressure at the surface is 1305 psi or 90 bar.
The difference is roughly the weight of a 3000′ high column of water on top of you.
That increased pressure raises the temperature.
Venus has a surface temp of 750k 477c. To relocate it to the orbital distance of Earth would drop the temperature to roughly 650k. At Venus’ current atmospheric pressure, to reach Earth like temperatures it would likely need to be relocated to an orbit beyond Jupiter, about 7AU from the sun

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July 4, 2017 11:15 am

Tom

It kind of makes you wonder if black holes really do evaporate, doesn’t it?

Ibelieve I read somewhere on google about the atmosphere of venus! it is said to have .002 /100 parts of water,

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July 4, 2017 10:54 am

Rob

Science dies when scientists become politicians.

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July 3, 2017 7:08 pm

ricksanchez769

Or when they start kissing up to the politicians…

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July 3, 2017 7:47 pm

Bryan A

Or when they revert to activism

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July 4, 2017 6:52 pm

higley7

Exactly. Hawking might be a good physicist and great at mathematics but he is too trusting of the “science” he hears from other “scientists.” He has been duped. Give him five minutes with a real scientists who has examined the claimed “climate science” and he would go skeptics in seconds. The hard part for many people is accepting the fact that “climate scientists” who are selling manmade global warming are lying to the world for a living. Many find it hard to accept that they would sell out for the $billions and the agenda being pushed.

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July 3, 2017 7:56 pm

Menicholas

I think he has gone out of his gourd, sorry to say.
He is spouting delusional nonsense…gibberish.
It seems likely he is insane.
Raining sulfuric acid?
He has no idea what he is talking about, and this is the sort of drivel that even an idiotic teenager would know is fantasy.
I do not know why anyone should pay him any mind whatsoever.
He is plainly not speaking scientifically.
He is not even speaking rationally.
I wonder if he has been outside lately?
Possibly sharing whatever acid trip-type mass hallucinations that the warmistas suffer from, he seems to be having a particularly bad trip of it…man.

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July 3, 2017 8:28 pm

Greg

Don’t know if he has done much physics lately but I agree he does seem to have gone off the deep end.

The conclusions of the most intelligent people on the planet are only as good as the quality of the knowledge and information which they have available to which to harness their formidable intellect. What if what one has available to which to harness their intellectual sled has the quality and the power of a team chihuahuas? Do their formidable intellects work on the GIGO principle much in the same manner as the most powerful super computers? One would think so. Is it not likely that the highest intellect could take the garbage in and process it more rapidly and produce a more rapid and greater variety of garbage output than could the rest of us mere mortal everyday human beings? I know of no reason that the the powerful intellect wouldn’t be just as susceptible to attacks of mind-blindedness as are the rest of us, do you?

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July 4, 2017 4:48 am

MarkW

McClod, pretty close to 100%.

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July 4, 2017 6:55 am

Urederra

Greg July 3, 2017 at 10:22 pm
Don’t know if he has done much physics lately but I agree he does seem to have gone off the deep end.

Does the cameos at The Big Bang Theory count as doing science?

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July 4, 2017 8:09 am

mobihci

hawkings wasn’t duped, he is just a liar. obviously to him, at this stage of his life, his show and end result is more important than truth. science does not reserve people from making such judgements, but it will, in the end, call them on it.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30290540
it seems he likes this ehrlich like end of the world stuff.

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July 4, 2017 8:20 am

Tom Halla

The largest credible effect if the US stayed in the Paris accord was a reduction of .3C, the smallest .03C. Quite a stretch to get to 250 degrees and sulfuric acid rain.

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July 3, 2017 7:09 pm

Menicholas

Where is the sulfur going to come from?
Is he aware that Venus is a hothouse because the atmosphere is crushingly dense, and it is 30 million miles closer to the sun that we are, and there is a thing called the inverse square law?
Whatever brains he once had are long gone, it seems sadly obvious.

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July 3, 2017 8:30 pm

StephanF

That is exactly what I thought. I can’t believe that he actually made these comments. He may be an expert in cosmology but should be more careful stating opinions outside of his area of expertise.

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July 3, 2017 10:26 pm

commieBob

Also where’s the CO2 going to come from.

This year, the atmospheric CO2 level is right around four hundred ppmv. So to double, it would have to go to eight hundred ppmv … and even assuming we could maintain exponential growth for the next eight decades and we burned every drop of the two thousand gigatonne high-end estimate of the fossil reserves, CO2 levels would still not be double those of today. link

@ StephanF
“I can’t believe that he (Stephen Hawking) actually made these comments.”
One should keep in mind that Stephen Hawking only has access to the information and/or data that his, per se handlers, aides and/or assistants …… permit or provide him access to.
If Hawking has only been provided access to the “junk science” claims and “fuzzy math” calculations, estimations and insinuations associated with “CO2 causing AGW” …… then it is obvious he would have to support what he has per se “been told”.

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July 4, 2017 5:44 am

Alan McIntire

There are other factors at work than the inverse square law. Venus has an atmosphere about 100 times as dense as ours, and also has sulfuric acid clouds.
Since temperature is proportional to the fourth ROOT of radiation, and radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the sun, a planet identical to earth, 0.72 AU from the sun, would have a
temperature of { 1/(SQRT 0.72) }*287 K, or about 339 K. Of course that would be an unstable situation, with higher temperatures leading to more ocean evaporation, more clouds, and the disassociation of water molecules into their Hydrogen and Oxygen constituents higher in the atmosphere, etc.

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July 4, 2017 6:00 am

texasjimbrock

Also, credit the fact that all of his compatriots are academicians, many of whom are on the climate change gravy train (and whose academic reputations would be ruined should their scare-mongering be shown to be fabulous.)

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July 4, 2017 7:56 am

Walter Sobchak

26 million million but what is few million miles among friends. More important is the ratio of the squares of the radii. Which = ~1,9. So Venus receives almost twice as much solar energy as does Earth. Of course it is hotter there.

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July 4, 2017 8:09 am

John V. Wright

+100. Thanks Tom, I was wondering when someone was going to point out that piece of highly ‘inconvenient’ research. Even more telling than Prof Hawking’s apparent ignorance of it is the fact that it is pointedly not mentioned by the BBC. When I was getting my journalism degree back in the late 60s we learned about balanced reporting and the need to mention, early on in a piece, alternative or opposing points of view. The BBC, once the sine qua non of journalistic standards, has now become a red-faced embarrassment. Pallab Ghosh, for example, is the BBC’s Science Correspondent – not a reporter, note, but Correspondent, a title that denotes seniority and a journalist with a wide-ranging knowledge of his specialty.
Similarly, they have Roger Harrabin as their Environment Correspondent who regularly provides po-faced, unbalanced commentaries about global warming (always ‘climate change’ these days on the Been after the earth stopped warming in line with rising CO2 levels) and the coming disaster. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to witness Christopher Moncton addressing a largely left wing and hostile audience at Keele University in a discussion about global warming. His Lordship was, predictably, magnificent but for me the most significant part of the evening was when he made a passing and mischievous reference to the BBC’s impartiality on the issue of global warming. His audience dissolved in laughter – that is how far the BBC has descended in its journalism…it has become a laughing stock even to those people who are its traditional supporters.
I make this point because it is important for us all to remember that although it is sad when a distinguished man of letters such as Stephen Hawking makes a complete ass of himself that it is the sombre, serious and – yes – completely unbalanced way in which it is reported by the BBC and other MSM that does the real damage.

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July 3, 2017 11:08 pm

Michael darby

If you thought Christopher was good a couple of years ago, you should have seen him in 1988:

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July 3, 2017 11:21 pm

Geoff

“Science is a cooperative effort, so the impact will be wholly bad, and will leave British science isolated and inward looking”.
Science is NOT a co-operative effort. Throughout history advances have only been made by the brilliant insights of just a few individuals. Science of the establishment mob has not empowered these individuals by encouragement.
Britain has ignored the lessons of history, choosing to be part of the EU collective. The average Briton has part a terrible price for group think socialism.

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July 3, 2017 7:10 pm

Count to 10

Eh. You can kind of say that there were a number of scientific advancements that were made by inspired individuals, but most of science is a long slog by groups who are in competition to offer up cooperative contributions. This is particularly true for most modern science.
That said, Hawking is still talking nonsense here.

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July 3, 2017 7:34 pm

JohnKnight

Count,
“You can kind of say that there were a number of scientific advancements that were made by inspired individuals…”
I’m sayin’ it ; ) and stretching that number to the vast majority, as far as I am aware . .
” . . but most of science is a long slog by groups who are in competition to offer up cooperative contributions.”
I don’t believe it . . unless you just mean; if there was competition, all competitors constitute a group . . or are just lumping people that advanced work done by others together, in the “shoulders of giants” sense . . I mean, of course discussions and checking out others ideas and results and so on is a good thing (and can obviously be done even easier now, regardless of something like the Brexit), but “group-think” is not especially . . productive in science, as far as I’ve seen . .

Actually it isn’t and it is. Under Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions model, breakthroughs are often made by individuals. Long slogging “normal science” then fills in some of the blanks.

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July 3, 2017 10:59 pm

texasjimbrock

Count: Hmm. I recall some discoveries by individuals or small teams. DNA structure. Benzene ring structure. Einstein’s equations. Residual radiation from the big bang. Vaccines. Oh, hell, just consider: there is no such thing as the common mind (ie, a mind shared by many participants). And guys like Richard Feynman don’t come along every day.

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July 4, 2017 8:02 am

Colorado Wellington

Isolated, inward looking, self-referential—he must be talking about “climate science”.

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July 4, 2017 12:12 am

MarkW

Was it Newton who said that the only reason why he could see so far, was because he stood on the shoulders of giants?

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July 4, 2017 6:57 am

Gabro

It’s unclear what Newton meant by using that phrase in a letter to Hooke. The phrase “a dwarf on the shoulder of a giant sees farther than the giant” was already a commonplace in 17th century English. It’s possible that Newton was belittling Hooke, who wasn’t a dwarf, but was hunchbacked.
Here’s what Newton actually wrote in 1676:
“What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants.”
Most historians of science think Newton wasn’t slighting Hooke, since they were still on cordial terms at that time. Only a few years later, after Hooke had dared to challenge some of Newton’s ideas on optics, did they have a falling out, which grew more bitter until Hooke’s death in 1703.

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July 11, 2017 2:09 pm

fredar

Cooperation and group think is not the same thing. You are confusing the two. Of course scientists should work together and discuss their findings with other people. They should not live in a cave somewhere or never share their findings with others or refuse to see findings from other people. They should not think that they are automatically right and everyone else is wrong. That would be bad. Scientists SHOULD cooperate, discuss and debate with others. Group think is when some scientist or group of scientists assume authority and impose their view on others. And if you disagree you labelled as “heretic” and are kicked out of the community.

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July 4, 2017 8:30 am

Roy Hartwell

You only have to see the postings on Facebook from ‘Scientists For EU’ to see this very effect !

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July 5, 2017 2:41 am

South River Independent

Someone hacked Hawking’s computer. Any guesses?

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July 3, 2017 7:11 pm

AussieBear

The Russians…

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July 3, 2017 8:12 pm

Leo Smith

the Russians

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July 3, 2017 9:36 pm

Rascal

Maybe he isn’t getting enough oxygen >

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July 3, 2017 10:14 pm

RockyRoad

The DNC masquerading as the Russians.

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July 3, 2017 11:22 pm

I Came I Saw I Left

Al Gore. Would make a great South Park episode.

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July 4, 2017 3:42 am

Joe

I wonder if the AGW alarmists will point out the the eminent prof H is not a climate scientist and hence should butt out?

Indeed, it’s the excuse for silencing many other commentators who are able to think for themselves, assess evidence and come to a contrary conclusion to the “consensus”. It’s the intelligent, independent-thinking 3% we should be listening to to provoke contrary and questioning thought. That’s how advances in civilisation and science are made, not by clinging to the safe group-think.

Given that the Earths atmosphere has been both warmer/hotter and held vastly higher concentrations of CO2 in the past, yet we are all still here and so is the planet, I have to wonder at his logic.
Further, with regard to the “isolation” of British scientists post-Brexit, I wonder if Hawking has heard of these things called the internet, telephones and even ships or aeroplanes that help connect scientists to each other in distant parts of the world. I think Hawking himself has managed to use these means in the past.
Sometimes it seems those in possession of the highest IQs are actually the least practically intelligent people.

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July 3, 2017 7:13 pm

Menicholas

Translation…he has not a trace of common sense.

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July 3, 2017 8:32 pm

tony mcleod

This is where we get the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids.
Despite being a genious, if he says something I don’t agree with, then that makes me smarter. Wow.

I’ve long been wondering about Hawking’s neurological condition. It is usually referred to as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), but as an MD I’m not aware of any other case that has survived even half as long as Hawking has.
ALS is not supposed to affect the mental faculties, but can we be sure that
a. this remains the case if the patient survives this long,
b. Hawking even has ALS and not some other condition with similar motor manifestations, which however does also affect cognition?
I personally don’t feel sure of either.

Tony: do you know Godwin’s law? It applies not only to you know who but equally to your tired “Dunning-Kruger effect.”

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July 4, 2017 5:24 am

Eustace Cranch

At least I’m smart enough to know how to spell genius.

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July 4, 2017 5:36 am

MarkW

McClod, offering up projection at it’s finest.

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July 4, 2017 7:01 am

tony mcleod

No I was just smart enough to google it before prattling on about it.
It’s not about smart people getting things wrong. It’s about under-educated people over-estimating their knowledge or ability and also the reverse – smart people under-estimating theirs.
Moa below gets it completely arse about.

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July 5, 2017 5:13 am

MarkW

McClod, so you were able to google a term and then proceeded to declare that those who disagree with you are suffering from it.
As I said early, projection is the only mental skill you have mastered.

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July 5, 2017 7:35 am

Jeffrey Mitchell

Or so smart they’re stupid.

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July 3, 2017 11:08 pm

markl

Oh the humanity!

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July 3, 2017 7:14 pm

Joe

I would like to hear prof hawking’ opinion on lord Monckton upcoming paper on the feedback formula.

It is amazing to see a smart person like StephenHawking being so confused by low grade propaganda from Global Warmists. He seems unwilling to use his critical faculties and intelligence to examine the statements and arguments about ;Global Warming’.It would take more than coal plants to turnthe Earth into a Venutian Hell. People moving from Minnesota to Florida show a greater grasp of reality than Stephen Hawking.

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July 3, 2017 7:15 pm

Count to 10

Hawking’s wheelchair is always plastered with left wing bumper stickers, and his physics has always been theoretical, self contained, and based on hypothesis more than data.

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July 3, 2017 7:41 pm

Menicholas

Exactly…he may have been more of an idiot-savant than a sprawling intellectual giant.
There are people way smarter and have shown acumen across a great many fields and areas of thought…men like Freeman Dyson for example, who reject the warmista jackassery out of hand.
It is made up boloney, the lot of it.
There is no shred of evidence anything bad is happening, and much practical proof that the world is blossoming and becoming safer, greener, more tranquil, and hospitable for life.
That someone who has a mostly undeserved reputation for being extra smart has bought into the most over-the-top brand of alarmism we have ever heard only means his brain has turned into pink cereal.
Poor bastard.

It’s the “theoretical” physicists who seem to be most out of touch with reality. After all, reality can seriously upset ones theory when they meet head on.

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July 3, 2017 9:23 pm

Count to 10

…and I say this as a theoretical physicist who’s doctorate was in Hawking’s general field.

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July 4, 2017 6:58 am

Roger Dewhurst

His medical problem started with his muscles. But now the problem seems to have reached his brain.

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July 3, 2017 7:16 pm

Menicholas

Being stuck in a withered body must be a terrible thing to live through for all these years.
We know that a healthy body is required to nourish the brain and keep it functioning properly.
In any case, I see no reason to think that he is even the person saying this gibberish…it seems more likely he is a sock puppet for his caregivers.

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July 3, 2017 8:40 pm

Tim Groves

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” – Arthur Conan Doyle
Stephen Hawking died and has been replaced.http://milesmathis.com/hawk3.pdf

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July 3, 2017 11:59 pm

Menicholas

Explains a lot Tim.
i have wondered about this a few times over the years…how the hell he was still alive when almost everyone with the disease is gone in a few years.

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July 4, 2017 12:28 am

R Shearer

He’s someone’s bitch me thinks.

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July 4, 2017 1:55 am

Menicholas

I am not placing too much stock in that theory of him being dead. He may be, or maybe not. maybe he had some dental work, and they figured out a way to get him more calories.
I few pics is not much to go on.
There is a more convincing case about Faul McCartney. Just look it up on youtube.
Facial analysis.
Enough to be convincing as long as you are looking at the pics.
But then stand back and wonder what it would take to keep anyone from spilling the beans.
He does look different, and so does McCartney, and George did always call him Faul after a certain point in time…

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July 4, 2017 2:34 am

Tim Groves

Miles has a theory on Paul too. Apparently he is twins and the earlier twin retired and lives in comfortable obscurity. Childhood pictures of paul with brother Mike McGear are really of the twins, and the adult McGear is unrelated to them.
Also, Miles has worked out the John Lennon didn’t really die and is currently living in Toronto where he pretends to be a Lennon impersonator.
This is all very entertaining stuff as well as totally flaky to the unaccustomed ear, and it’s way off topic and best avoided at WUWT, but the possible death of Hawking and the possible subsequent fraud in marketing him as a living “expert who speaks for science” is, I think, a valid subject. Hawking’s death around the time he had that tracheotomy done would make perfect sense. ALS patients don’t usually linger on for decades and they don’t get fatter over time, as the Professor has.
But even if the real Hawking still lived and breathed, he would be totally dependent on his handlers and his words would be dependent on whoever controlled his PC. Outsiders would have no means of verifying that he was the author of anything attributed to him. He would be literally a puppet, a living version of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

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July 4, 2017 5:14 am

Menicholas

I never gave the Paul McCartney thing a thought until I happened across a you tube video and a website with about a million pics of Paul before and after September 1966.
It is impossible to deny that he appears to be a different person…different face, larger stature, sounds and plays differently.
The big thing is the face…the relative position of such things as eyes and chin and mouth do not change as one ages…the bones of an adult to not change shape or length.
If anyone thinks it is impossible…just give this a few minutes of your time:https://youtu.be/kJ–09W0eqk?t=1m54s

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July 4, 2017 9:32 pm

M E Emberson

I think that he has just been elevated to the status of ‘prophet’ just as H G Wells was at the beginning of the 20thC. So any pronouncement is treated with reverence and not questioned especially by younger reporters…. anyone under 50yrs old.

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July 4, 2017 3:47 pm

Phil Rae

Thanks, Eric! I saw this ridiculous piece of “news” from the BBC yesterday and sighed! They just can’t stop pumping out this drivel, can they? Today, they’re showing pathetic pictures of buildings in New York and Paris lit up with green LEDs to highlight the “Paris Agreement” ahead of the G20 meeting! And yet, they still haven’t even mentioned anywhere the shift in US energy policy that was signalled last week by Trump. The once-venerable BBC has become a more & more of a joke over the past 20 years! Pretty sad!
Please keep up the good work at WUWT, drawing attention to the stories and facts that actually matter and providing a place for discussions on such a wide diversity of real science!

Hawking’s just might have a point
With…
President Trump’s Paris Agreement Decision might Destroy the World
“the World” will not be receiving billions and billions of American Dollars 💲💲💲 after all
…and I’m certain “the World” was totally destroyed over not getting their greedy hands on our money
Boo Hoo 😭

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July 3, 2017 7:23 pm

Butch2

How do any of us know what he actually said ??

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July 3, 2017 7:24 pm

Menicholas

Blink once for yes and twice for no?

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July 3, 2017 8:42 pm

Eustace Cranch

Maybe we should send him to Talos IV with Captain Pike. He’d probably be happier there.

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July 3, 2017 9:05 pm

Menicholas

If only.
I am reaching the point where I would be happier there.
Do we get that blonde chick?

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July 3, 2017 9:58 pm

Rascal

What if all of this is simply due to a speck of dust in his eye, and the computerized speech system controlled with small eye movements just misinterpreted?

You’re spot on, Eric, thank you. The highest and the mightiest can say it, but we must continually press for evidence.

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July 3, 2017 7:39 pm

Menicholas

To call him the highest and mightiest is to disrespect a lot of people.
He deserves pity, but not to be headed as a fount of wisdom.
If it is even him saying this.
This drivel from anyone is reprehensible…no less so by dint of who speaks it.
Reprehensible, or just delusion.

My apologies. I wasn’t describing Prof Hawking specifically. Perhaps I should have said “Even the highest and the mightiest might say it” but we still ask for evidence. Still, there’s no doubt Hawking has been held in esteem to be among the highest. But I can’t join in the general condemnation on show here. No matter his sudden errors on climate science he has made contributions in physics that outshine numerous others.

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July 3, 2017 10:47 pm

Menicholas

My recollection from when I used to pay attention to those guys (I gave it up when it became quite clear that were heaping speculation on speculation as if they were talking about anything real) was that Hawking was shown to be wrong about most if not all of what he came up with after being the first to explain how a black hole might evaporate.
But no one knows what is going on inside of collapsed matter.
They are just making it up.
The whole notion that they can decide who is right and who is wrong because information can never be lost from the universe makes zero sense.
Examples: Raindrops hit the ocean in a certain pattern and order, and have done so for billions of years.
Where is that information?
The library at Alexandria was sacked and burned by the Romans (IIRC), and so went the repository for a vast store of unique texts.
Where is that information?
When a person dies, they have a giant amount of information in their brain…what happens once that brain rots or is eaten by worms or both?
The idea that all of this information is still in existence but just scrambled up a bit is ridiculous.
Conservation of mass and energy…well, OK, although it leaves the question of from whence came all the stuff?
But conservation of information as a bedrock principle of physics?
I missed the derivation lecture on that.

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July 4, 2017 12:51 am

Count to 10

Menicholas, “information” has a particular meaning in particle physics that is a little different than your intuition. Under that definition, no information is lost in your raindrop example. When speaking of black holes, “information loss” refers to a causal disconnect–evaporating particals having no causal connection to the particles originally swallowed by the black hole.
Still, there may or may not be some theoretical way of extracting information from the other side of an event horizon, but we certainly have no prospect of accessing a black hole any time in the foreseeable future to test any of it. Personally, I think that the postulating singularities extrapolates physics so far out of the realm of the known that something unknown may prevent them from existing.

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July 4, 2017 7:14 am

Menicholas

That is basically what I have always thought…that where equations go to infinity you need new equations.
I doubt the universe does infinity.
But human intuition does seem to prevent actual full understanding of quantum mechanics.

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July 4, 2017 11:57 am

Menicholas

Fair point if I misunderstand what is referred to as “information”.
I would certainly like to understand it.

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July 4, 2017 12:04 pm

Patrick MJD

“We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid,” he told BBC News.”
It’s sad to see a brilliant mind lose it so spectacularly.

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July 3, 2017 7:53 pm

Leonard Lane

Agree Patrick. It is sad to see someone in is condition.
At Richard Treadgold.
“No matter his sudden errors on climate science he has made contributions in physics that outshine numerous others.”
Are you assuming the contributions or do you have evidence?

Evidence. For a long time there has been widespread admiration of his achievements and writings. The abrupt onset here of sadness at his apparent decline is incongruous, notwithstanding that I too disagree strongly with his alarmist summary of our climatic future.

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July 4, 2017 2:30 am

RockyRoad

Hawking also advocates that humans must find another planet within 100 years–it’s imperative (somehow).
Personally, I work outdoors as much as I can in the yard, the pasture and my orchard.
In the past several months I’ve taken more time to notice my surroundings than usual, considering Hawking’s recommendations that we leave this amazing planet.
I’ll go under one condition: That the “new” planet is better than this.
I think I’ll be here until I age out.

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July 3, 2017 11:28 pm

Menicholas

Much of my criticism is regarding the totality of his recent statements and things he is advocating for.
This snippet about tipping points being perilously close…we are teetering on the brink, boiling oceans and raining sulfuric acid…bad enough.
But this crap about finding a new planet…well fine, if one comes along.
But why a hundred years?
And he makes it sound like we will ALL be going somewhere, because he has seen the future and as the smartest man to ever live he knows that after 4.5 billion years…well, in 2117 the jig is up and earth will be a acid soaked cinder.
I do not like that you can be locked up for hate speech in the UK and Germany and some other places…but I think scaring the piss out of children by telling them their planet is all but dead should be a hanging offense.
Kids are known to commit suicide after getting bad news they cannot process.

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July 4, 2017 2:45 am

A C Osborn

It is not just “Climate Change”, he is also worried about Asteroid strikes, as we should all be and Pandemics etc.
So he considers, as many do, that the Human Race needs to spread out to prevent a single catstrophe from ending it.

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July 4, 2017 6:45 am

Menicholas

A C Osborne,
And I agree with that.
But needing to do something never assured it being possible or it actually getting done.
We are heading in the wrong direction to get even started.
And deindustrializing over a scare story aint gonna help in the slightest!

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July 4, 2017 12:09 pm

Julian

Is there plans to change orbit as well?

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July 4, 2017 12:50 am

MarkW

I read an article many moons ago about a way to keep the earth cool as the sun slowly grows hotter.
Everyone is familiar with the so called gravitational sling shot, whereby a space probe can be accelerated by having it pass close to a planet on a carefully designed trajectory. A small portion of the planets momentum is transferred to the probe.
The sling shot also works in the other way if you use a different trajectory.
The article claimed that we could slowly increase the diameter of the earth’s orbit by using asteroids to transfer momentum to the earth. The author’s calculated that a single 100ft diameter rock, once a century would be sufficient.
(seems to me that a gravity tug would both be easier and safer.)

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July 4, 2017 7:10 am

Wayne Townsend

Is it too much to ask a renown scientist to actually use physics? Venus is not hot from CO2. It is hot from:
a. Being 1/3 closer to the sun and therefore experiencing more than 2 times the solar radiation per square meter.
b. Having an atmosphere 67 times as dense as the earth’s atmosphere.
Unless we are on the brink of changing orbit and transforming the oceans into atmosphere, his statement makes absolutely no sense.

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July 3, 2017 7:53 pm

Gustaf Warren

Venus is actually cool due to CO2. The law governing gas temperatures assigns co2 a lower energy holding capacity than standard atmospheric mix.
If you had atmospheric air from Earth comprising Venus’ atmosphere
the temperature would be several dozens of degrees cooler.
In fact there’s a very important thread here about that very fact by Steve Goddard revealing the level of sheer lying about fundamentals of thermodynamics done, by government employees for the past 30 – count em
thirty years.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/06/hyperventilating-on-venus/https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/

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July 3, 2017 8:31 pm

Niff

Dumbstruck

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July 3, 2017 7:55 pm

Ken Mitchell

“In a few centuries fossil fuel resources will likely be exhausted.”
If I thought that I was going to be around in a few centuries, I’d offer you a hefty wager that you’re wrong. There are more “proven reserves” now than there were 10 or 20 years ago.

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July 3, 2017 7:57 pm

MarkW

Fossil fuels will be like every other commodity. As the easy to get at sources dry up, the price rises a little bit.
This causes the producers to spend more money to find and develop new sources(greater profit) and consumers to find ways to use less or substitute other products.
As a result we never really run out of anything.

The World most certainly will come up with a replacement for fossil fuels in the next two hundred years.

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July 4, 2017 7:14 am

markl

So it’s an appeal to authority for someone who deals in theories?

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July 3, 2017 8:03 pm

effinayright

Hawking has forever been in a snit because he came down with ” Lou Gehrig’s ” disease, not ” Stephen Hawking’s” disease.
He’s never got over it.

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July 3, 2017 8:05 pm

Tim Groves

The prognosis for “Lou Gehrig’s” disease (ALS) is not good. About 1 person in 25,000 will be diagnosed with ALS. Most of them die within 2 to 5 years of being diagnosed, usually because of respiratory failure. Stephen Hawking has apparently survived for 54 years (since his 1963 diagnosis) with it. That’s so far outside the bell curve that it’s nothing short of miraculous, or else its fake news and Hawking is no longer with us, and the man in the wheelchair who communicates with the world via PC is somebody else.

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July 4, 2017 12:10 am

Stu

I am beginning to have a hard time remembering why stephen hawking is suppose to be so great. It seems like he has become the punchline to some really bad jokes.

The claim about Earth’s becoming like Venus and raining sulfuric acid is the most ridiculous claim from a brilliant mind that I have ever read. Could someone have rigged a speaker into Hawking’s communication set up that broadcast what somebody else was inputting into his voice device? Such a ridiculous statement attributed to him makes me wonder.
This is a sad revelation of how scientific specialization can go horribly awry. Hawking obviously is not a polymath.

I’m just having a hard time wrapping my mind around the truth of Hawking’s having said what is attributed to him here.

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July 3, 2017 8:21 pm

Menicholas

Yes, I feel the same way.
If he said it, he is stupid and crazy.
If not his words, it means less than nothing.

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July 3, 2017 8:50 pm

gnomish

now you know.
he was only ever a poster boy for inverted values.
his claim to fame is being a cripple.
read his book. it’s stupid squared.

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July 3, 2017 10:58 pm

MarkW

He has been quoted as saying something similar about a decade ago.

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July 4, 2017 7:13 am

TA

Hawking has a lot of company in his thinking about CAGW. Many otherwise intelligent people have been fooled by the dishonest CAGW narrative, too.
Hawking is just another dupe adding to the confusion about the subject.

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July 4, 2017 7:45 am

Gustaf Warren

Hawking is a man
who believed a story
about special insulation put between a fire and the rock it warmed,
and as each subsequent percent less light reached that rock,
an additional percentage of light that never reached that rock
leaked out.
Less light warming a rock
makes it warmer,
than when more warming light warmed it.
Hawking is self confessed, too stupid to properly answer the question ”what happens to the temp of a light warmed rock, less light warmed?
The next time somebody tells you that you don’t understand global warming
tell them you do. But that you need them to show you how much warmer the planet gets
with each successive percent of available warming sunlight never reaching Earth due to Green House Gases.
Currently they stop 20% total warming firelight from the sun from reaching earth.
Have the global warmer tell you how much warmer earth got when warmed by 1% less sunlight.
Then have him tell you how much warmer the planet got when warmed by 10% less sunlight.
And then on to 15%
and on to 20% which is how much Green House Gases stop from reaching the earth today.
Make them explain it to you in exacting detail. Before you break out laughing in their face.

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July 3, 2017 8:15 pm

MarkW

Last time I checked, CO2 doesn’t block visible light.

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July 4, 2017 7:14 am

BigBubba

And in breaking news, geologists have just discovered a more recent epoch which they are calling the Anthropo-Narcisscene
Spokesperson for the Stratigraphic Society said that despite the almost incomprehensible enormity of the earth time record, and the inversely proportional almost incomprehensible temporal insignificance of homo sapiens, there has been a massive upsurge in rectal deposits emanating from middle aged depressive academics and politicians desperate to validate their fragile and brief existences on planet earth!

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July 3, 2017 8:25 pm

Walt D.

I you don’t already know what a coprolite is, look it up.
We can then refer to the current period as The Coprocene.

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July 3, 2017 8:45 pm

Jim G1

Unfortunately, it appears as if even very bright people can become useful idiots for a political cause. Very sad, indeed.

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July 3, 2017 8:32 pm

Moa

It is the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action. Look it up.

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July 3, 2017 9:17 pm

tony mcleod

Try looking through the correct end of the telescope.

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July 4, 2017 3:34 am

Jim G1

It has more to do with the desire, or in some cases, career need to be accepted at the cocktail party, office or on tv than the degree of mental capacity involved. Though some of the Venus comments do make one wonder.

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July 4, 2017 6:56 am

MarkW

Try removing the telescope from your nether regions.

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July 4, 2017 7:15 am

tom0mason

Well done Stephen, if and when the weather changes back to a 1960s-1970s cooler regime your judgement will be questioned, and as these things tend to go the judgement of your particular scientific specialty may be looked at with more critical eyes.

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July 3, 2017 8:37 pm

mikebartnz

By spouting crap like that he has ruined his reputation and shows he is just another clown.

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July 3, 2017 8:42 pm

petermue

+1000
Not only reputation but also credibility.
Ruined with one statement.

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July 4, 2017 11:34 am

AJB

About as quantitatively challenged as Lord Nincompoop of whimsy …
“What do I say? I simply try to explain to people that here are the facts upon which this is based. Here is a community, surely you can’t believe that you have got 10,000 or more people signed up to some secret pledge to misrepresent the evidence? And that essentially 99 per cent of the people who work in the subject recognise uncertainties about time scales and other details but have unanimity in that putting a million years’ worth of fossil fuel carbon back into the atmosphere each year is thickening the greenhouse gas blanket and is going to make a difference. You should listen to them.”
“I would have the hubris to say that I believe common sense, helpfully illustrated by toy models, can point you in the direction that many others are pointing in. They can point you in ways which will not prevent bad things happening but will make them less likely.”
Someone hand the fool a soaking wet duvet, enough with the radiative myopia and childish blanket sucking.

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July 3, 2017 8:48 pm

Fraizer

I believe another famous physicist and a quote applicable to Hawking’s screed:
“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong,”
Extra points if you can name the source (no googling)

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July 3, 2017 8:54 pm

tetris

That’s attributed to Wolfgang Pauli – German theoretical physicist.
The problem is that the quote does not apply to Hawkins. Hawkins is actually fundamentally wrong. Period.
There were many, eminently qualified, who questioned his appointment to Newton’s chair in 1979.
Newton’s revolutionary theories have served as the basis for an ever more sophisticated understanding of how the universe and its various components interact.
So far, Hawkins has added little of any consequence to the fundamentals. Instead, he has lent his name to various causes that belong in the modern sphere of what 17th century Newton’s would have understood as alchemy..

Yeah, the worthiness of his supposed statement for consideration as right or wrong is not in question. The statement is coherent and focused on already established ideas. But the statement is combining these already established ideas wrongly. Consequently, we are able to judge its wrongness — it is WRONG.
If he had said, “White unicorns are sweating poisonous fumes into the biosphere,” then I would say that THIS is “not even wrong”, because the existence of unicorns is unfounded, let alone their ability to sweat poisonous fumes. In other words, it would be nonsense, therefore, unworthy of a judgement of EITHER “right” or “wrong”.

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July 4, 2017 9:00 am

Eustace Cranch

For broad-based intellect and critical thinking, I’ll take Richard Feynman, rest his soul, over Hawking any day.

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July 3, 2017 8:57 pm

Menicholas

The other day Hawking was quoted as saying the human race has no more than 100 years to find another planet.
If this is not proof that either his intellect has turned to soft mush, or some nincompoop is inputting words into his voice-box, what could be?
He ought to know better than anyone that there is no possibility of a human being making a journey to another star system, unless we invent some sort of warp drive.
Considering it took tens of thousands of years of using fire and tools to figure out how to make the stuff we have today, it seems likely that if we discover how to fold space in the next few thousand years, maybe a few tens of millennia after that we will turn that into a practical starship.
Imagine a vessel that could take a group of people on a journey that would take tens of times longer than recorded history…all self sustained and no catastrophic failures over a longer period than humans have had a civilization.
Yeah…a hundred years oughta do it.

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July 3, 2017 8:59 pm

Menicholas

And that is if we somehow knew where to go with it.
I would be surprised if humans have even begun to explore any of the barren rocks in our own solar system by them.
100 years goes by fast…fifty years ago we were about to go to the moon.
Today we have no ability to send a person into low Earth orbit without hitching a ride from the Russians.
And every launch that does not blow up on the pad is a minor miracle.
Sending a few hundred pound robot to Mars takes decades of effort and many of them crash or just disappear.
Space is a huge disappointment…it is very inhospitable off the Earth, machines that can do those tasks are complicated and temperamental, and it will remain a risky waste of money for a very long time.
I hate to say it, but it is true.
I thought i was going to go to space when i was a kid…but then the world moved on and we all grew up.

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July 3, 2017 9:06 pm

Ken Mitchell

“The other day Hawking was quoted as saying the human race has no more than 100 years to find another planet.”
Building a starship isn’t a question of physics any more; we KNOW how. All that remains is engineering. An Orion Nuclear Pulse Drive would take a breeding stock of humans to another star system – IF we knew where to go. If you’re going to tell me that us now knowing how to build an Orion starship would be like Robert Goddard saying that he knew how to build a moon rocket – yes, that’s exactly where we are. We’ve got decades of ENGINEERING work to do to get there. Along the way, we’re likely to make lots of new discoveries. But Hawking’s PHYSICS knowledge is just about irrelevant to the ENGINEERING work that will take us to the stars.

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July 3, 2017 10:37 pm

Menicholas

Ken, you think that someone is going to another star once we get a few decades of engineering out of the way?
By using a nuclear pulse drive?
Over a distance of light years?
Dream on.
We can barely be sure of getting a rocket into orbit without it blowing up.
It is likely cosmic rays will kill anyone outside of the Earths magnetic field within a few years if not a few months. And outside the heliopause?
But the main point is the time.
Time means mass, for everything anyone will possibly need. Which means a really big ship…which means a really large number of nukes…
How are we going to get all that mass into space?
Can’t build a space elevator…the terrorists will knock it down like cat knocking over legos.
You think we will build a machine that will function and keep people alive in interstellar space for thousands of years?
If we did, it will never get there?
Why
Because… The first (or the second or the fifth) generation of kids will turn that thing around the day they get the controls!
Why would they want to spend their lives going someplace they will never see, or their kids…or even their great to the 20th kids…but if everything goes right someone might get somewhere and it might be a place that can be lived on…or ..oopsie, maybe not!
It is a useless bet, but I will bet you that no one in the world will be spending tens of trillions of dollars so a few people can go on the most expensive suicide mission in history.
Not in a hundred years.
Maybe in ten thousand.
But not likely.

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July 4, 2017 1:09 am

Menicholas

Honestly, I doubt even a dead person will make it to Mars in a hundred years.
And if they get there, they are not getting back.
Anyone who thinks so just is not paying attention.
Or is just kidding themselves.

I appreciate optimism as much as anyone…really I do.
Since I was a young kid I have been reading everything there is to read in the sci fi universe.
But those are stories.
The reality is we have almost no ability to get mass into space or to work up there…or to build flawless machines that will keep working without a team of engineers and a huge budget…and that is on the ground.
The distance, the cost, the time it will take…all are deal breakers.
But that hardly matters…we have the scientists of the world insisting we deindustrialize because of a myth!
We have a slow motion invasion going on that wants to take the whole world back to the dark ages.
When we elect someone who wants to clean up the crony system that is looting our country blind, a third of the population goes absolutely insane!
Let’s face it…no interstellar mission is happening.
Not with entire generations being miseducated and taught to be more concerned with safe spaces than actual knowledge.

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July 4, 2017 1:39 am

TA

I think we probably need to bypass normal space to have any chance of going very far into the universe on a short timescale. Space has a lot of particles floating around in it which can be very destructive if you collide with them while traveling at very high speeds. The faster you go, the more danger they pose.
If we don’t develop a fast method of interstellar travel, humans will move from one solar system to the next by using the planetary bodies that surround the stars as steppingstones between them. Of course, that will be a slow process.
But the human race has nothing but time. 🙂

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July 4, 2017 8:01 am

Menicholas

I think our best chance is to be taken pity on by one of the spacefaring civilizations that already exists.
Because the “Where are they all” question is a real one.
If no one is already there, it seems doubtful it is possible.
Billions of years lead time on us, and all those planets as possible sources for others?
How could it be there is no one up there already?
Just too far between stars?
Or maybe the space wasps are well aware of us and have us on the menu for June 18th, 2054?

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July 4, 2017 1:41 pm

Mark T

Is it possible to know if he’s really making these claims anymore? Or just his handlers?

With no Paris agreement, will death rates increase?
From an Issue paper by Juanita Constible, Natural Resources Defense Council:
KILLER SUMMER HEAT:
PARIS AGREEMENT COMPLIANCE COULD AVERT HUNDREDS
OF THOUSANDS OF NEEDLESS DEATHS IN AMERICA’S CITIES.
Is this claim true?
I am a climate realist, that means I look at the totality of what is happening to the climate with increasing CO2 levels, and what it means for our future.https://lenbilen.com/2017/07/02/with-no-paris-agreement-will-death-rates-increase/

I certainly hope Stephen the best. His situation is tragic and it causes me to wish him well even though I’ve never met him.
I don’t consider his judgement sound. That shouldn’t be a difficulty for most folks. Stephen isn’t like other people and isn’t able to think rationally. If I were in his situation I wouldn’t be able to either. He deserves our pity and support. He isn’t capable of providing leadership.

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July 3, 2017 9:19 pm

gnomish

he deserves Our pity? Our support? do you hear yourself? you’re not conscripting me into your liberal victimhood.uber.alles racket.
i owe him no pity.
on the other hand, it would be an act moral embezzlement to withhold the recognition of his complete idiocy.
that’s what he has earned from me – that’s what he deserves.
stupidity is not a virtue to be rewarded with other people’s pity. nature provides for it at the Darwin Awards.

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July 3, 2017 11:33 pm

Menicholas

He had my pity until he started in on the end of the world muckraking and panic mongering.
Support?
Nah…why? He makes more money than I ever will.
But now?
I will go back to pitying him when he decides to apologize and tell the truth and then STFU.

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July 4, 2017 2:51 am

lewispbuckingham

The interview was broadcast on SBS in Australia as well.
The US is actually reducing its CO2 footprint.
The big emitters are not.
So what is scary about Trump?

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July 3, 2017 9:25 pm

Menicholas

That is one of the stranger aspects of this particular side branch of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

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July 3, 2017 9:49 pm

mathewsjw

who typed Stephen Hawking’s statement into the computer? when I saw Hawking on an NPR special it was “aides” typing stuff into the computer and Hawking would sometimes pencil hit enter, sometimes the “aides” would do it.. very sad

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July 3, 2017 9:25 pm

Roger Knights

Hansen was the originator of this Earth-to-Venus prophecy, wasn’t he? Possibly that where Hawking got the idea. But even Hansen is now soft-pedaling this prospect, isn’t he?

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July 3, 2017 9:42 pm

Keith J

Hansen also turned the air conditioning off and kept conference room windows shut when making his presentation in 1988.

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July 3, 2017 11:34 pm

Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy

Those who are criticising Donald Trump, the US President for withdrawing from Paris agreement should first understand the differences between climate change and global warming. Climate change was there in the past, is there at present and will be there in future. In the case of global warming, so far there is no clear cut quantified climate sensitivity factor. Scientists coming up with positive results on using CO2. If this is achieved, the process of global warming [if any] could be reversible in near future.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy

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July 3, 2017 9:45 pm

Menicholas

Besides for that, we have the geologic record, which is quite clear that we are in a very cold period of the Earth’s history…one of the coldest.
And when it was far warmer on average, the world was not just livable but lushly verdant from pole to pole.
The idea we are at some tipping point, or that warmer temps are to be feared, is utter lunacy.
It is made up hogwash, with no facts to back it up.

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July 3, 2017 9:52 pm

Menicholas

There are no tipping points…billions of years of history proves it.
The Earth and the biosphere take what comes.

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July 3, 2017 9:56 pm

TA

“There are no tipping points”
No, not in the entire history of Earth. Which at times, had much more CO2 in the atmosphere than now, yet no tipping points. There is no evidence for tipping points. CAGW promoters should be required to provide some evidence of their claims of tipping points.

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July 4, 2017 8:10 am

Menicholas

Really, the ice cores and the lag of CO2 behind temperature that they show speaks to this very forcefully… high and rising concentration of CO2 does not push warming to ever more extreme levels, and low and decreasing levels of CO2 do not lead to perpetual ice.
At the core of this nitwit notion of CO2 as being the thermostat of the planet, is a refusal to acknowledge a single pebble of the mountain of proof that it is not.
There is far more than the ice cores to prove it, but it hardly matters…the notion is falsified.
Before anyone even needs to get to any of the many other independent lines of evidence that on their own disprove it.
I think we need to come up with a phrase to refer to “CO2 is the temperature control knob of the atmosphere”.
Something that that sums it up, is obvious, and casts it in the appropriate light.

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July 4, 2017 1:12 pm

Eric Stephan

Of course there have been tipping points in Earth’s history. Both entering and exiting ice ages. During an earlier ice age the entire earth was covered in ice. So tipping points into or out of catastrophic conditions are clearly in the geologic record.
Having said that, I agree with the consensus here, that Hawking’s statements are ludicrous.

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July 5, 2017 2:48 pm

Menicholas

The tipping points in question have to do with runaway warming being triggered by a tiny increase in temperature caused by a trace gas increasing slightly…and still no where near levels that it had been over most of Earth history…with no such runaway heating.
The full glacial/interglacial transitions are not exactly a tipping point in the sense that they are referring to…more like two modes that are alternating.
The big question (regarding ice ages) is…why are we in an ice age at all?
The last one before this was hundreds of millions of years ago, and the Sun was not as strong then, or so we are told.
Rather than runaway warming, there is a well defined cap in temps that it has never gone above except briefly…but has frequently stayed very near to that upper bound:http://www.vonborks.org/Pages/Walt/1.jpg

Prof. Hawkings appears to have forsaken the central principle of the scientific method. It is the falslfiability of the claims that are made by the model that is the product of a scientific study. The claims that are made by modern global warming models are not falsifiable thus they are not scientific.

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July 5, 2017 9:09 pm

Mark

What evidence is Hawking using to reach his conclusions?
I wonder if he has a line of reasoning, or if he is just relying on the conclusions of others.

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July 3, 2017 10:21 pm

Menicholas

There is no evidence or reason for such pronouncements…it is scaremongering of the most completely reckless and unfounded sort.
He takes the worst of the exaggerations and doubles down on them and then takes out the qualifiers and weasel words, leaving it stated as if a fact.
Then calls out our President by name as responsible for it all even though the US is now the only country cutting emissions.

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July 4, 2017 2:55 am

TA

“Then calls out our President by name as responsible for it all even though the US is now the only country cutting emissions.”
Isn’t that ironic. It’s just delusional. And the US will probably continue to reduce its CO2 output while all the others are either not reducing, but increasing their output, or are struggling to meet their CO2 goals.
The US did better than other nations on emissions during the Kyoto treaty era, too, even though the US refused to abide by the Kyoto treaty. The same thing is happening again with CO2.

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July 4, 2017 8:17 am

gallopingcamel

William Thompson (aka Lord Kelvin) was a prominent scientist in his day yet he made some absurd statements such as these:
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
“Radio has no future.” “X-rays are clearly a hoax”. “The aeroplane is scientifically impossible.”
I think this is Hawking’s “Kelvin Moment”.

I know that the citations are out of grip with reality and that they are detached from a scientific argument.

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July 3, 2017 11:40 pm

gnomish

Science or Fiction is very much qualified to judge reality. it’s your judgement that’s faulty.
you are not the only one who may judge hawking’s mind. it’s the right of every man who possesses the faculty of judgement and who wants to bother.
that’s what judgement is for.

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July 3, 2017 11:44 pm

Menicholas

I feel quite certain that i am in every way qualified to judge his words and by extension his grasp of facts, his grasp on reality, and his motivations and intentions.
Taken as a whole, his statements, both here and in weeks past on the prospects for the Earth as a home planet for the human race and the whole of the biosphere, demonstrate derangement, delusion, a shockingly unscientific demeanor, and no grasp of even the basics of several branches of natural science, including chemistry and physics and astronomy.
Coupled with an alarmist mentality, and a sickeningly patronizing tone while being so utterly brazen in his panic mongering, it amounts to him being afflicted with the very worst case of warmista jackassery I have ever witnessed.
Plus he is stupid and crazy.
And if I could, I would tell him all of that to his face, then ask him why he wants to scare children who have no way of knowing he is making it all up?
Nor, apparently, do quite a few adults…as you have made us aware.
Do you understand that what he is saying is that everyone must knuckle under to the fascist takeover of our economy?
That we must all consign ourselves to living a life of energy poverty?
That the poor nations of the Earth must remain so…tens of millions consigned to eternal poverty and misery?
I would have more respect for a fire and brimstone preacher than for a fire and brimstone fake scientist.

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July 4, 2017 3:15 am

MarkW

cracker demonstrates the fallacy of appeal to authority.
In it’s mind, Hawkins can’t be wrong because he’s a genius.

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July 4, 2017 7:19 am

Warren Blair

Hawking who still believes in Einstein’s ‘relativity of simultaneity’.
Dear Stephen,
What does the ‘relativity of simultaneity’ offer the value of observations made by observers in relative motion above those by equivalent observers stationary in the simultaneous event’s reference frame?
I thought as much . . . and you’re even less qualified to pontificate on climate matters of which you know nothing of importance.

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July 3, 2017 11:26 pm

Keith J

Venus has no free water, instead it has sulfuric acid. Far higher boiling point and much lower vapor pressure. No wonder it is hot.
No magnetosphere either. And with the dense atmosphere, carbon dioxide exists in supercritical state at the surface. This isn’t going to happen with a few ppm more of carbon dioxide.

Some theories claim that Venus’ heat is independent of the compostion of its atmosphere, and its temperature is determined by the density of the atmosphere and amount of solar energy received at its location in space.

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July 4, 2017 8:25 am

The Reverend Badger

Perhaps someone should look into those theories in a little more detail and discuss them on a Climate Change blog.
Or do some experiments.
Or write a scientific paper.

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July 4, 2017 12:50 pm

Menicholas

Your Holiness,
Surely you can’t be serious?
Our grant applications have been repeatedly rejected, our labs been shut down due to running out of funding, pending the next check from Exxon Mobile and the Koch brothers of course…and you do not want to get me started on the pal review kerfuffle that ensues every time a skeptic submits a paper.
And stop calling me Shirley.

Hmmm. We’ve burned through roughly 1/3rd of known fossil fuel reserves and emitted roughly 750 billion tons of carbon as CO2, which has added perhaps 0.3C of CO2 induced global warming recovery, which has been beneficial.
In addition, the added CO2 has increased crop yields by roughly 25% from CO2 fertilization and has increased plant drought resistance…
Because CO2 forcing is logarithmic, if we burn ALL fossil fuels (an economic impossibility because of supply/demand/price dynamics) we’ll perhaps contribute another 0.5C of CO2 induced warming…
How Hawking comes up with 250C, is anyone’s guess, but it certainly isn’t based on physics and empirical evidence.
I wonder if Hawking will be held accountable for making such an absurd claim based on absolutely no evidence or physics, when this absurd CAGW sc@m is officially deemed disconfirmed in about 5 years?
The Left has lost its collective mind… it’s sad and embarrassing to witness someone like Hawking make such a fool of himself.

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July 3, 2017 11:33 pm

Menicholas

It would be sad and embarrassing if he did it in a scientific way.
He did this in a political way, naming our President as responsible for his imaginary horror story.
That takes it out of the realm of the sad and into the realm of abstruse political muckraking.

Nor did it turn out to be correct.
His belief that the Earth can somehow exude 90 times the atmospheric pressure with a gas that is desperately sought be all plant life is interesting, However it is impossible.

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